Pothinus, Blandina and the Martyrs of Lyons

The Church of Gaul before the persecution

The Christianity of the Rhône valley was in its origins a Greek transplant from Asia Minor. Lugdunum, the capital of the Three Gauls, was the commercial hub of the west, and its church had been founded and was still led by men from Asia: its bishop Pothinus (Photinus in the Greek books), by then in his nineties, is said in the tradition to have been a disciple of Polycarp of Smyrna, and it was to "the brethren in Asia and Phrygia" that his church wrote in its extremity. Its presbyter — absent from the amphitheatre because he had been sent to Rome with letters — was Irenaeus of Lyons (August 23), who came back to inherit the widowed see and to write the Against Heresies.

Christianity was not the object of a general edict in 177. What broke over Lyons was the combination of a hostile populace and a governor willing to indulge it: Christians were first excluded from houses, baths and the forum, then mobbed, then arrested, and only then examined judicially. The formal charges were the ordinary slanders of the second century — cannibalism, incest, "atheism" — and the pretext of refusal to swear by the emperor's genius.

The seizure and the examinations

At the first arrests a young man of rank, Vettius Epagathus, a Christian of blameless life, asked leave to speak in defence of the accused. The governor refused to hear the defence and asked instead whether he too was a Christian; he said that he was, in a clear voice, and was added to the company.

Some failed. About ten of those arrested denied Christ, and their apostasy — the letter says — grieved the confessors more than the tortures. Among them was the woman Biblis, who was tortured on the assumption that a weak apostate could be made to corroborate the slanders against the Christians; and under the torture she came to herself, contradicted the charges, declared that Christians do not eat children, and confessed the faith she had denied. She died with the rest.

The tortures fell most heavily on four: Sanctus, a deacon of the church of Vienne; Maturus, only recently baptised; Attalus of Pergamum, a man of standing and a Roman citizen; and Blandina, a slave. Sanctus would answer every question — his name, his city, his condition — only with the words "I am a Christian", and when the rack and the scourge failed, sheets of red-hot brass were pressed to the tenderest parts of his body, until his flesh was one wound and his very shape was lost; and days later, when it was supposed that a touch would kill him, he revived under further torture.

Blandina is the letter's chief marvel, and its authors say so plainly: a slave woman, of frail body, whose Christian mistress — herself among the martyrs, and unnamed in the document — had been in terror that she would not have the strength to confess. She wore out her torturers in relays until they gave up in exhaustion and confessed themselves beaten, while she repeated only "I am a Christian, and among us nothing wicked is done."

Pothinus, the bishop, was fetched from his house by the soldiers, so old and so ill that he had to be carried; the mob dragged him along, and when the governor asked him who the God of the Christians was, he answered, "If thou art worthy, thou shalt know." He was beaten and thrown into prison, and died there after two days. Many others died of suffocation in the crowded and airless cells before ever reaching the arena.

Martyrdom in the amphitheatre

The killings were staged as public entertainment at the games of the province in the amphitheatre of the Three Gauls. Maturus and Sanctus were taken through the whole ordinary sequence — the scourge, the mauling by beasts, the iron chair heated until the fat ran — and, still living and still confessing, were finished with the sword. Attalus was led round the arena behind a placard reading "This is Attalus the Christian"; because he was a Roman citizen the governor held him back for instructions from the emperor, and when the reply came — that citizens were to be beheaded and the rest thrown to the beasts, and the apostates released — Attalus was nevertheless put in the iron chair and roasted, and Alexander, a Phrygian physician long resident in Gaul who had been seen encouraging the confessors from the crowd, was taken and suffered the same day.

Blandina was hung on a stake in the arena in the form of a cross as food for the beasts, praying aloud, and the beasts would not touch her; she was taken down and returned to prison. On the last day of the games she was brought out with Ponticus, a boy of fifteen, and the two were made to watch the torments of the others each day in the hope of breaking them. The boy died first, strengthened, the letter says, by Blandina's encouragement "as by a mother." Then Blandina was scourged, set on the red-hot gridiron, wrapped in a net and thrown to a bull which tossed her repeatedly, and at last killed with a dagger; and the pagans themselves admitted that they had never seen a woman endure so much.

Relics and translations

The bodies of the martyrs were deliberately denied burial. They were left exposed in the open for six days, guarded, while Christians who tried to recover them were prevented; then they were burnt, and the ashes swept into the Rhône — done, the persecutors said, so that the Christians should have no hope of a resurrection and no relics to keep. The letter records the taunt and answers it: the Church has no need of dust to be raised. For this reason there are no bodily relics of the martyrs of Lyons, and their memory was kept from the first not by a tomb but by a document.

Veneration and later cultus

That document is the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons to the churches of Asia and Phrygia, written by the survivors within months of the events and quoted at length by Eusebius of Caesarea in the fifth book of the Ecclesiastical History. It is the fullest and most humane martyr-narrative of the second century: precise about names, ranks and places, candid about the apostates, theologically careful — it is this letter that insists the confessors refused the title "martyr" for themselves while still alive, reserving it for Christ the faithful witness and for those already perfected. The same letter records that the confessors in prison wrote to Rome on the Montanist question, and that they sent their letters by the hand of the presbyter Irenaeus, commending him.

Their commemoration passed into both calendars. The Roman martyrology keeps Pothinus, Blandina and companions on 2 June; the Byzantine synaxaria keep the same day, entering Photinus the bishop, Sanctius the deacon, Vettius, Epagathus, Ponticus, Biblis, Attalus, Alexander, Maturus and those with them, with Alcibiades of Lugdunum as a further line. At Lyons the martyrs remained the city's own: the church of Saint-Nizier is traditionally associated with their memory, and the hill of Fourvière and the amphitheatre are shown to pilgrims. Blandina in particular became the patron of servants and of the enslaved, and one of the small number of women of the ancient Church whose courage is described at length by eyewitnesses.